The goals of the proposed Digestive, Metabolic and Kidney Disease Research Education Program (DMKREP) are: 1) to expose 1st and 2nd year medical students early in their career decision making to state-of- the-art basic and translational research specifically in digestive, metabolic and kidney diseases, and 2) to reinforce these experiences longitudinally through education and mentoring emphasizing careers in academic science provided by an integrated academic Learning Community (LC) focused on the scientific principles and practice in these fields. The DMKREP employs an immersion model of medical student training and education, which reflects the Medical College of Wisconsin's four-fold mission of education, discovery, patient care and community engagement. These goals will be achieved through three integrated programs: First, students will receive rigorous, hands-on, fundamental research experiences within the research laboratories of NIH-funded MCW investigators in the fields of digestive, metabolic, and kidney diseases over a 10-week summer period. Second, the DMKREP participants also will be matched with a clinical mentor in a congruent area of digestive, metabolic or kidney disease. Students will be encouraged to shadow their clinical mentor in the outpatient clinic or hospital setting to gain early exposure to the clinical aspects of the disease they are studying in the laboratory. Third, participants will b integrated into the DMKREP's LC, which aims to engage the students throughout the remainder of their medical school education. The LC will sponsor monthly meetings with participating students to encourage continued progress on research projects (including work towards Honor's Research) and to foster continued learning in research and career development topics relevant to the mission of the DMKREP. The participants themselves will become part of the LC throughout their medical education program, as they encourage and interact with each other and subsequent groups of matriculants as they enroll in the DMKREP each summer. The overarching goal is educate and train a diverse workforce to address the nation's biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs in digestive, metabolic and kidney diseases that impact on human health.